Friday, August 12, 2016

A delicious topic: How fundamentalist religions cope with sexuality in general and with women's sexuality in particular?

The
short answer is that all fundamentalist religions frown upon
non-reproductive sex, including homosexuality. They also wish to take
the ownership of a woman's sexuality away from her and assign it to her parents or her husband.
The deeper answer is that those religions want control of all
fertility. Those goals require that women should not be able to control
their own reproduction.

At this point in my writing I
feel a strong pull towards discussing how getting more
people-in-the-pews or on prayer mats keeps religions powerful and large,
how that works against the whole idea of contraception or even
non-reproductive sex, and how it ultimately means that women must be
assigned the role of producing babies for the common good but not the
role of determining how many or at what intervals.

This
time I won't go there. Instead, I want to look at that fascinating
storm of emotions which are revealed when, say, an Islamist preacher
argues that the world will end if the sexes are allowed to intermingle
at work or in the public sphere. Why will the world end? Because such
intermingling will cause people to copulate like bunny rabbits, on the
streets, in the stores and on the roofs! Marriage will collapse!
Nobody knows what man sired what child! Chaos ensues!

See
what a frightening and powerful force sexuality is to such a preacher?
It's almost as if the only thing which stops him from participating in
such orgies is that women are segregated from men and properly covered
up. One frail wall of fabric is all that keeps the flood of erotic
tornadoes at bay.

And the maintenance of that wall of
fabric is the duty of women. Indeed, while all fundamentalist religions
want to appropriate women's sexual agency, none of them wish to take
any responsibility for the sexual attraction between heterosexual men
and women. That task they see as belonging to women alone.*

Men
are viewed as sexually liable to stray** and women are to stop that
straying. Hence the solution to the imaginary storm of random sex the
fundamentalists so fear is to make women behave better, to make
women the goalkeepers in the game of pre-marital sex (where heterosexual
men are expected to try to get the puck in the net and heterosexual
women are expected to try to avoid that outcome), to tell women to avoid
places where rape and other sexual assault might happen (as John Kasich
has just suggested), to tell women to cover up so that the weak men will not fall into sin (did she wear a mini-skirt? was her hair showing?)

Thus,
although the fundamentalists want to control all sexuality and rule out
homosexuality altogether, much of their focus is on the control of
female sexuality. Customs such as female genital mutilation (FGM)
are to make women less sexual, more faithful wives, less likely to take
lovers***. Female masturbation is the most pleasant of roads to hell and dildoes the homes of Satan.

And then there is the novel idea of sado-masochistic sex as a road to heaven for women, a form of religious female submission turned into the language of pronography [sic], this being one depiction of the kind of sexuality that is seen as acceptable among some believing women of fundamentalism.

When
I put all this together (whether it belongs together or not), I get an
explanation of women's sexuality inside various fundamentalist
movements:

Women should not be active agents in sex, they should be active agents in stopping the kind of sex the fundamentalist fathers don't want them to experience, but otherwise their role should be passive and subject to the control of their kin.

The
incentives for women not to have "improper" sex consist of largely
punishments. The US anti-feminist right and the home-grown misogynists
argue that sexually active unmarried women become soiled toilet paper,
will never be able to have a happy marriage, will end up alone and
weeping over their cats, whereas nothing much is written about the
destiny of sexually active unmarried men, as long as their partners are
female. That's because men cannot become soiled toilet paper.

Other
types of desired punishments abound. Some pro-life activists seem to
regard unplanned pregnancies as the proper punishment for "sluts" and
the resulting children as an appropriate life sentence. Those who don't
want to subsidize "sluts" having sex in their health insurance policies
when contraception is also covered never to howl out in despair about
how other people's Viagra prescriptions amounts to exactly the same kind
of subsidies.

The differences are driven by the deeply hidden assumption that it is women who are responsible for not having sex of the wrong type. On the whole, very few restrictions in that field apply to heterosexual men's erotic life.

Finally, consider this form of punishment for women who report a rape or a sexual assault at the Brigham Young University:

Students
say Honor Code involvement means a victim who reports an assault faces
possible punishment if she or he was breaking curfew, violating the
dress code, using drugs or alcohol or engaging in consensual sexual
contact — all banned by the code of conduct — before an attack. In a
statement, BYU said a student "will never be referred to the Honor Code
Office for being a victim of sexual assault," and that its Honor Code
proceedings are "independent and separate" from Title IX investigations.
But multiple BYU students investigated by the school's Honor Code
Office disagree, saying they were scrutinized as a result of reporting a
sex crime. In some cases described by past and current students, Honor
Code investigations were launched even when the accused assailants were
not BYU students — the alleged victim being the sole possible target.

This
smells to me like a (much) milder version of the difficulties of
proving rape under the sharia law****. If a woman fails to make her
case she can then be punished for adultery. In both of these cases,
the specter of punishment for consensual sex serves to make women less
likely to report rape or sexual assault.
-------

* From 2006, this story gives us the most explicit version of the belief:

In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in
Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: "If you take out uncovered meat
and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or
in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose
fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?"The uncovered meat is the problem."The sheik then said: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."He said women were "weapons" used by "Satan" to control men."It
is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls 90
per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon
of enticement (igraa)."

** An extremely sexist assumption, by the way, amounting to assuming that men have no self-control at all or even need it.

No religion promotes or condones FGM. Still, more than half of girls
and women in four out of 14 countries where data is available saw FGM as
a religious requirement. And although FGM is often perceived as being
connected to Islam, perhaps because it is practiced among many Muslim
groups, not all Islamic groups practice FGM, and many non-Islamic groups
do, including some Christians, Ethiopian Jews, and followers of certain
traditional African religions.

Psychosexual reasons: FGM is carried out as a way to
control women’s sexuality, which is sometimes said to be insatiable if
parts of the genitalia, especially the clitoris, are not removed. It is
thought to ensure virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward, and
to increase male sexual pleasure.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

This post* is from the imaginary series of what weird stuff Echidne's
mind latched onto when it was supposed to do real work, and has to do
with the way polygyny is traditionally defined: One man with more than
one wife, ranging from two to some very large number.

But
suppose we flip that around, without changing the truth value of the
definition at all: One woman with a fraction of a husband, the size of
the fraction depending on how many women have to share him.

Isn't
that fun? The first definition of polygyny sounds like a potentially
good thing for the lucky husband**: lots of sexual variation, lots of
opportunity to make the wives compete with each other for attention,
lots of power.

The second definition (mine) shows why
polygyny may not be a good thing for any woman who would prefer at least
one whole husband.

All that is simplified. But the
basic nature of polygyny is that the women are expected to share, and
not only the one husband, but also his resources, including any
inheritance he might one day leave behind. And all the children must
compete for the one man's attention.

Then there is the
traditional division of power in polygyny: The lion's share of it goes
to the husband. But even if that aspect was fixed the general sharing
problem would remain.

-----
* First published here. For something similar, in that we tend to view some topics from a biased angle, see this post on mail-order husbands.

** But not for all
those heterosexual men who won't find even one wife because someone else
is taking more than one. That's a real problem, given the fairly equal
sex ratios at birth, at least in the absence of enough warfare to kill
lots of men.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

This was first posted in 2010, but its concerns: about the lack of proper vacation time in the United States, are still with us. If anything, they might be stronger today, because any hope of collective action by American workers might be waning with the waning of unions. By the way, I find it deeply ironic that the so-called "family values" party doesn't want families to spend time together. That's visible in all the policies the Republicans oppose: parental leave, proper vacations and so on.

Have a look at this list of statutory minimum employment leaves by country and then check out the attached map. Don't forget to scroll all the way down to United States.

Now,
I'd call that minimum requirement of zero days (and even the U.S.
averages of actual leave taken) cruel, especially during times like this
when a job is hard to get and difficult to hold onto. Who would ask
for leave, however necessary it might be for health reasons, for
reasons of relaxation and refueling and for reasons of spending time
with one's children, work on one's relationships (or one's house or that
great American novel) and so on?

And let's not forget
that the forty-hour week is really just a pleasant pretense, these days,
in many industries and especially in white-collar jobs with any income
attached to them. Sure, you can argue that those "choosing" such jobs
are picking the money over the time. But then they cannot really
convert that money into time for themselves before retirement. If even
then.

Could this be the reason for the fierce consumerism I sometimes lament here? If you are never going to have any real time for living, expensive toys are a good substitute?

Connect
the rest of the dots in this story, by remembering the lack of proper
maternity leave here, and you might start to see why this scarcity of
proper and socially sanctioned time-off not only hurts all workers but
also almost sanctions the traditional gendered division of labor:

The
Designated Worker Ant is expected to be busy working, almost all the
time. The other necessary tasks must either fit into the dwindling
number of hours left over after work or they must be picked up by
someone else: kids, laundry, those broken and tangled emotional
connection threads. The latter work is unpaid but necessary, and the
rigid labor market expectations may say
that they honor those obligations from the Full-Time Worker Ants but
that's just talk. In reality they'd prefer the workers to be robots
which can be turned on and never turned off and all "negotiating" (to be
discussed later) starts from that position.

The usual
outcome is that women, the traditional providers of all those unpaid
services, will be more affected by the myth of the Designated Worker
Ant. It is women who are more likely to work two shifts: one at paid
work and one at home, it is women who are usually in charge of finding
and monitoring paid child-care arrangements, it is women who are more
likely than men to not become the Designated Sole Worker Ant in ant
families which pick this solution but to either work fewer hours for
money or not at all, and therefore it is women who fall off the ant
career paths more often than men.

But being the
Designated Worker Ant is not all good for anyone. People are not ants
and workworkwork with a few expensive toys thrown in is not a good
prescription for a happy life. Not even for men, though the culture has
managed to cast that fate as a form of winning for men though not for
women. What it is one wins remains a mystery, however, given the losses
of close family relationships, mind-expanding hobbies and time to work
on that great American novel or that old family chair with the broken
leg.

Why am I writing on this topic again? Probably
because I just came back from a very long vacation (not all of it spent
vacationing, though), and realized how life-saving it has been, how very
necessary, how crucial for making me love writing again. Without the
vacation I wouldn't have realized how dry I had squeezed my Inner Lemon,
how tired I was, how hard I had worked. Even goddesses who love their
work get tired!

So what about the rest of us ants in
this anthill? Surely the same opportunity should be available for all
of us? We are not robots. Maybe that should be tattooed on every
forehead in this country, right next to "we demand better working
conditions"?

Yes, something that extreme might be
necessary, because the opposite messages keep playing in the media all
the time: We Must Work Harder To Win The Globalization Wars! The
Chinese Charge Less! The Indians Will Take Your Job You Lazy Ant!
Europe Cannot Survive Its Long Vacations And Its Great Laziness!

And
even the hesitant little stories questioning these rigid work rules
frame the plot with questions such as "Why Do Americans Want To Work So
Hard?" As if they were given any choices about it! But note that
reading several such stories even I started believing that it's just
something about the water here that makes Americans eager not to have
vacations. Just the way it is.

But of course the real
answer is much simpler: No country got nice vacations by gently asking
for them politely, in private negotiations between one worker and one
firm. The firm would just laugh at an applicant stating that he or she
wanted four weeks off every year, because another sucker could easily be
found who wouldn't make that demand. And if I'm applying for a job as a
janitor at IBM or the local university I cannot make any kinds of
demands at all.

No, all those great vacation rules were
achieved through political action and trade unions, and collective
action is the only way to get the counterveiling power which makes the
corporations agree to more humane working conditions in general.
Globalization has increased the power of the corporations to fight such
actions, true. But without a renewed collective effort both here at
home and internationally those conditions will never improve. Indeed,
they will probably get worse.

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

I'm offering you a hammer or a saw or a chisel in these toolkit posts, not to build furniture or a house with, but to equip you to argue with people who, say, don't believe in the existence of any gender gap (and/or racial gap) in wages.

This first post* in the series:

If you read the comments (yeah, I know) to this blog post about the Wal-Mart case, you will come across an old chestnut about sex discrimination in earnings. It goes like this:

If women were really as good workers as men but were paid less because of discrimination, why would Wal-Mart, or any other firm, hire men at all?

The
implication is an obvious one: Wal-Mart does NOT discriminate against
women. The reason women earn less is that they deserve less, being less
capable workers. If this were not the case, wouldn't Wal-Mart just hire
all women at those lower wages?

Or put in different
terms, a firm run by someone who doesn't discriminate against women
would use this information to hire an all-female labor force. Because
women would cost less to employ for the same levels of productivity,
that firm would have higher profits than the discriminating firms. Over
time firms of the former kind would take over the industry, and --
presto! -- discrimination would die a natural and painless death.

This
argument was initially made by Gary Becker, an economist, a very long
time ago. It is not an uncommon argument from conservatives (or from
certain types of anti-feminist sites.) That does not mean that it
shouldn't be discussed. So let's do that by looking at what is
unrealistic about the specific conclusions.

To do that, the model to begin with is Becker's basic model. He
covered the concept of discrimination (whether based on race, gender or
other group characteristics) as a dislike (or hatred) by either the
owner/managers of the firm, by the co-workers or by the customers. AND
he covered discrimination in an artificial model where all participants
know all relevant information. That information includes the true
productivity of every single worker.

Most of the time Becker treated the three possible discriminating identities separately. Thus, in the first model only owner/managers have
a dislike towards workers from a particular group. That, my friends,
is the model from which the above conclusion comes, though even then it
would only work to eradicate discrimination from the whole industry if
the industry was essentially a competitive one. If the industry is not
sufficiently competitive, the bigoted owner/managers can hang on and
practice discrimination.

Did that read as rather dry? I
can't think of a juicier way of telling the story, but basically Becker
argues that if the only problem we have consists of some bigoted
owner/managers, while everyone else is just so sweet, sufficiently
well-lubricated markets can get rid of those nasty bigots, always
assuming that everybody knows everything relevant about everyone else.

There are no misconceptions in the model. Even the bigoted owner/managers of a pizza parlor, say, know
that Joe and Jane are equally good pizza-bakers. They just hate Jane
and are willing to hire her only if they can get her for less money.

This cannot last if we can find at least non-bigoted nice owner/manager.

That's
the background of the old chestnut. Becker, having become immersed in
the imaginary world of his simple model, concluded that competitive
industries would never exhibit any long-run sex or race discrimination.
Only oligopolies or monopolies could survive with at least some bigoted
owner/managers.

But what happens if we let not only the owner/manager dislike poor Jane, but also the customers she serves?

Suppose
that some customers storm out when Jane serves them but none do when
Joe serves them. In what sense are the two still equally productive?
Now Jane won't bring as much revenue to the firm, despite being an
equally good pizza-baker. In fact, from the firm's point of view she is
a worse employee than Joe, because she will contribute less to the
firm's profit. And this has nothing to do with her baking ability.

The
situation has changed, has it not? Even a sweet non-discriminating
pizza parlor owner might have to get rid of Jane now. Even if her
baking skills exactly equaled Joe's baking skills.

The
point of this sub-model may be the fact that perfect information about a
worker's productivity, a completely unrealistic concept, still wouldn't
be sufficient to keep the discrimination against Jane separate from her
ultimate productivity. Jane would end up either fired or earning less
than Joe.

Which sorta cracks the chestnut, at least in service occupations.

The various Becker models can be played with to produce differing predictions. But they all suffer from that perfect information assumption.
Information about people's actual productivity is not freely available.
If it was, no firm would ever hire someone unsuitable or subject new
workers to trial periods and such. Indeed, if everybody knew everything
else life would be very different from how it actually is.

More
realistic models allow for missing information about the true
productivity of workers, at least in the short-run. What takes its
place? One possibility is statistical discrimination.

Suppose
that Jane has applied for a job, gotten an interview, and now walks
into the firm's human resources office, clad in a neat suit, carefully
made-up and carrying her resume. How will the representative of the
firm on the other side of the desk assess her likely productivity?

One
possibility is that the interviewer will use both the information in
Jane's resume, the information produced in the interview and the
interviewer's own ideas about how people who "look like" Jane have fared
in the past. Or how that person regards them in general. That Jane is
female is part of that information.

This might mean
that the way the interviewer sees women in general could affect the way
Jane is viewed. If the company has never hired women before, Jane
presents it with a risk. If the interviewer doesn't think much of
women's abilities in the advertised job opening, Jane may be rated lower
than an equally qualified applicant who just happens to be called Joe.

More realistically, bigoted views about a certain group of workers can seldom be fully separated from their assessed productivity.
Someone who dislikes Jane because of her gender will find fault with
her pizzas, too. There are few jobs where the measurement of
productivity is easily disentangled from the overall impression a worker
gives someone. And it's the latter which often determines pay raises
and promotions.

Which is a long way to say that firms mostly cannot tell the true productivity of their workers.
It's bound up in the same tight bundle with all sorts of views,
including possibly discriminatory ones, as well as personal likes and
dislikes. A Wal-Mart manager who expects women to quit to have children
will promote fewer women to management, not because she or he hates
women but because of the use of the class "women" in the evaluation of
all individuals in it.

And yet the basic Becker model doesn't even allow for such motives!

Neither does it include social norms. Social norms matter. A lot. Yet they are absent in that old chestnut, as well as in Becker's general work.

To
see why they matter, suppose that in a certain society the social norm
states that women should not supervise men at work. Suppose, also, that
there are quite a lot of trained women in that society who could do the
job of supervision, defined in the technical sense. Borrowing from
Becker's world, wouldn't an owner/manager who doesn't care about this
social norm have a great opportunity there? Just hire all these women
for management jobs! They will work for less, given the lack of
opportunities the social norm causes, right?

To make
things really simple, suppose, finally, that there are enough male
workers who don't mind a female supervisor and enough nice customers to
patronize this firm. I have set up the whole thing so that great
profits are an obvious conclusion.

Until the firebombs and the broken windows and the death-threats, perhaps, to make things lively. If the rest of the society
cares enough about the upholding of this particular social norm, the
fact that all the direct players don't care about it is irrelevant. The
firm which violates the social norm will be punished. Perhaps not with
violence but economic boycotts would work, too.

The
point of this example is that well-lubricated markets and non-bigoted
direct participants may not be enough to end discrimination against
women or minorities.

This post has gotten very long,
for which I apologize. I could have written even more about the
problems of taking simple economic models for reality and the mistakes
that causes. And on empirical findings which contradict the conclusions
of the old chestnut. And so on.

Monday, August 08, 2016

The next three weeks will see lots of re-posting on this blog, as well as stuff I have created for your enjoyment in the last two weeks. I'm going to add fresh posts when/if I get the chance. I wish you all a very good August!

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